Social Media and Everyday Life in South Africa by Tanja E Bosch

Author:Tanja E Bosch [Bosch, Tanja E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Computers, Internet
ISBN: 9781000225693
Google: aBIHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-22T03:52:17+00:00

Facebook: brief background

Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg on 4 February 2004. It was originally just for Harvard students, but shortly afterwards access was granted to all university students and the site was opened to everyone in May 2007; by 2008 it was available in languages other than English. The popularity of the social networking site increased exponentially, accompanied by an equally high level of scholarly interest and exploration. Facebook has 2.4 billion monthly active users, 1.49 billion daily active users and 47% of Facebook users only access the platform through the mobile app; in addition, Facebook adds 500,000 new users each day and six new profiles every second (Smith, 2019). In South Africa, there were 14 million Facebook users in 2016 (representing 8% growth from 2015), with 85% using mobile devices, and Facebook remains the biggest social networking site in South Africa, with 25.47% of South Africans active on the platform (SA Social Media Landscape, 2017). The growth of Facebook can also be attributed to the introduction of Facebook Lite, introduced in 2015 as a solution for users in developing countries with poor data connectivity or 2G networks. The Lite version of the app works well on lower-end Android smartphones, as it uses less data, with a smaller text size and a simpler visual design.

There is a wide range of existing academic literature on Facebook, and this section does not attempt a comprehensive literature review, but simply provides a very brief overview of existing Facebook research pertaining to South Africa and the continent. Much of the existing scholarly literature on Facebook (and social media) in Africa has focused on its impact on democratisation, governance and political mobilisation, particularly in contexts characterised by authoritarian regimes, poor governance and government corruption. The so-called Arab Spring uprisings, referring to the 2010/2011 citizen protests in Tunisia and Egypt, are often characterised as Facebook or Twitter revolutions, and while the centrality of social media in these protests has been debunked, academic literature tends to acknowledge the role social media played in choreographing the protests. Social media like Facebook created opportunities for people to form personal networks and circulate information to challenge a national media blackout, thus facilitating the formation of a national collective protest identity (Breuer, 2012). Facebook platforms were used to garner public support and to mobilise citizens into offline political action. Mare (2014), for example, has shown that while Africa is the continent least connected to the internet, pockets of resistance are emerging on social media, which has become the new protest drums, creatively appropriated by citizens and highlighting an increasingly interconnected relationship between online and offline activism.

Bosch, Mare and Ncube (2020) showed how Facebook played a key role during elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya, expanding the democratic political space and public sphere and representing a communicative platform for political discourse. Despite the opportunities social media platforms create for politicians to engage with their citizenry, these pages tend to become monological spaces where citizens engage with each other, with governments remaining unresponsive (Bosch, Mare, Ncube, 2020).

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